When we see records being broken and unprecedented events such as this, the onus is on those who deny any connection to climate change to prove their case. Global warming has fundamentally altered the background conditions that give rise to all weather. In the strictest sense, all weather is now connected to climate change. Kevin Trenberth

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Monday, August 5, 2013

Dog-mushing
tour group Knik Glacier Tours was forced to shut down operations weeks
earlier than planned when Troublesome Glacier, in Southcentral Alaska
near Palmer, began to split open beneath the crew’s feet on Saturday,
following weeks of hot weather that caused rapid melting on the glacier
despite a thick covering of snow.

“I’ve never seen a
glacier deteriorate so fast,” Owner Rick Casillo said on Thursday. He
has been leading tours on Troublesome Glacier for the past 10 years.

Knik
Glacier Tours leads 2-mile dog sledding tours on the glacier, using
veteran Iditarod dogs that seamlessly navigate the route, allowing
tourists to steer a second sled behind the lead musher.

At
the beginning of the season, the crew sets up camp at lower elevations;
as summer progresses and snow melts, the crew moves to higher elevations
to stay on deep snow pack and away from bare ice. They had been camping
at a high-elevation spot for around two weeks, where snow cover was
measuring nine feet deep, when the glacial crevasses began to form.
“That was the crazy thing about it,” Casillo said. "(Crevasses) usually
don’t open up with that much snow.”

Crews discovered the
first glacial crevasse, a 6-inch-wide hole in the glacier, in front of
crew member Nick Guy’s tent on Saturday morning. The crevasse was only
wide enough to stick your foot into, but it extended “probably 1,000
feet” into the depths of the glacier, Casillo said.

The
crew marked the crevasse’s location, repositioned Guy’s tent, and
continued on with their day. But soon, they discovered a second crevasse
of similar size near the dog’s kennels. Then, a third.

As
the extent of the rapidly-developing crevasses became clear, Casillo
took to the air to survey the glacier’s conditions. Cracks were showing
on the side of the glacier, and there didn’t appear to be anywhere safe
to set up camp. So Casillo made the call to end the season then and
there. “That was the first time I’ve actually had to shut down because
of crevasses,” he said.

Snow is constantly melting on the
glacier during summer months, but this season’s heat took the melt to a
whole new level. Cloudless days and the burning sun brought temperatures
that normally hover around 50 degrees on the glacier up into “t-shirt
weather,” Musher Eric Rogers said.

Crews will also normally
dig a ditch to position melting water away from the camp, but this
year, “it turned into a stream, flowing down the glacier like a bandit,”
Rogers said.

Casillo had more than 100 people booked to
tour the glacier in the next few weeks. “That was a tough thing to
stomach,” he said, but he noted that the season had been profitable
regardless. Among the cancellations were military veterans with the
Wounded Warrior program, to whom Casillo had donated free tours.
Casillo, an Iditarod runner who has renamed his kennel Battle Dawgs in support of Alaska’s Healing Hearts program, was most upset about having to cancel on the veterans.

This was Rogers’ first summer working on Troublesome Glacier. While
he has seen operations shut down by snow and fog while working on
glacier tours in Juneau, “I’ve never been chased out by crevasses,” he
said.

Outhouse accident a bad omen?

Saturday
was a surprise, because everything was “looking really great,
everybody’s happy, and all of a sudden we start stepping in these holes
in the ice,” Rogers said.

Rogers said that Saturday’s
troubles really began, however, in the outhouse, after an accident
proved to be a bad omen for the rest of the day.

Rogers
described the tour group’s make-shift outhouse as a wooden structure
sitting on two PVC pipes, which keep the structure aloft above the snow.
Inside is a honey bucket that acts as the toilet. Every morning, Rogers
gingerly steps into the outhouse, testing to make sure it’s stable on
the snow.

All seemed well on Saturday, but the hot days had
melted the snow from the outhouse’s exterior, leaving it on an unsteady
pedestal of snow.

“I
settled on the throne and was entering deep contemplation when the
outhouse shifted on its base and tumbled over backwards. Oh Fecal
Material! Literally! I climbed off my back, opened the door and stood
there in the toppled structure bare from the waist down. Luckily the
honey bucket didn’t spill -- thank you God.”

That’s
when his coworker, Nick Guy, emerged from his tent and found Rogers
standing amid the tumbled toilet. Guy helped Rogers resurrect the
outhouse, and even resisted making fun of him.

After the outhouse incident, Rogers was struck with the feeling that “it was going to be a bad day,” he said.The
bad omen was soon confirmed. Hours later, as glacial crevasses cracked
open around them seemingly out of nowhere, the tour season came to an
abrupt halt.

Rogers writes:

“As Saturday
progressed we went from no surface expression in camp to doing
one-leggers into 4 different crevasses that spanned camp from one end to
the other. Nothing wider than half a foot, but the fact we had been
walking on that surface for a week and not known there was anything
there got our attention. Like the outhouse, very disconcerting, but
nobody hurt.”